The 2017 Boston Legal Market And What It Means For 2018

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Abby Gordon is a Senior Director in the New York office where she focuses on placements of partners, counsel, and associate candidates for law firms and in-house. Her focus is primarily on the New York, Boston, and European markets. Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in Government and Romance Languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Prior to recruiting, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York, and for the last five years for European clients in Paris, France. She regularly participates in professional and career panels and has published numerous articles offering career advice and tracking trends in the legal market (links to which are on her LinkedIn profile). She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts, and Maine state bars. Abby is fluent in French and Spanish, and enjoys dabbling in Portuguese and Italian. You can view additional articles by Abby here.

The Boston legal market has seen significant growth over the last few years. Several major international law firms have opened new offices in Boston, many hoping to carve out their share of the market with respect to Boston’s core industries: tech, biotech, health care, and other life sciences-related businesses. Lateral hiring is strong. If you are strategizing the next stage in your career — whether it’s a move within Boston, a move to Boston, or staying put at your Boston firm — you should consider market indicators and be sure you understand the dynamics from 2017. While it is impossible to cover all relevant statistics in one article, I will focus here on overall lateral hiring compared to prior years, hiring by practice area, and hiring by firm.

Lateral Hiring Year-on-Year

Between January 1, 2017, and the start of this week, November 26, 2017, there were a total of 424 lateral hires in Boston (268 associates, 91 partners, and 65 counsels).[1] This figure is down slightly from the corresponding time frame in 2016 (487 total Boston lateral hires) and 2015 (475 total Boston lateral hires) but still up from 2014 (403 total Boston lateral hires) and 2013 (400 total Boston lateral hires). Keep in mind that I am only comparing the first nearly 11 months of each year. While we would generally expect hiring to be busiest in the first half of the year after year-end bonuses are paid out and attorneys look to move on, Boston hiring actually picked up in the second half of 2017. There were 188 hires between January 1, 2017, and June 30, 2017, compared to 236 between July 1, 2017, and November 26, 2017. So it’s quite possible that year-end total hires for 2017 could exceed 2016 and 2015 hires. Boston hiring is on an uptick and there are no indications that it will slow down come Q1 2018.

Hiring by Practice Area

As mentioned above, Boston is best known for its tech, biotech, health care, and other life sciences-related industries. This translates into a demand for legal work above all in the corporate (fund formation, venture capital, private equity/M&A, finance, and investment management) and intellectual property (patent prosecution and patent litigation, as well as trademark, copyright, and other soft IP) fields and real estate. If you are currently in New York or another major market and would like to take advantage of a true growth market in these core areas, a move to Boston is well worth considering.

Total lateral hiring in Boston from January 1, 2017, to November 26, 2017, by practice area breaks down as follows, with lateral hiring for other practice areas in the single digits:

Litigation: 129 (81 associates, 32 partners, 16 counsels)

Corporate: 94 (66 associates, 15 partners, 13 counsels)

Intellectual Property: 67 (37 associates, 20 partners, 10 counsels)

Labor & Employment: 39 (27 associates, 6 partners, 6 counsels)

Real Estate: 32 (22 associates, 7 partners, 3 counsels)

Trusts & Estates: 16 (10 associates, 3 partners, 3 counsels)

Tax: 11 (6 associates, 1 partner, 4 counsels)

The big surprises here? Litigation and L&E. Although hiring within litigation appears to be strong, a further look at the figures shows us that only about 1/3 of this hiring was by Am Law 100 firms, compared to more than 80% of the corporate lateral hiring by Am Law 100 firms. No one firm hired any significant number of litigators; instead, the hiring was fairly spread out. Traditionally, litigation lateral hiring nationwide has been less noteworthy due in large part to the larger pool of litigators coming out of law school compared to the talent pool supplying the many corporate and other non-litigation fields and sub-fields. As for Labor & Employment, with more and more new companies opening in Boston, look for this to be a growing field in Boston in coming years.

Hiring by Firm

Based on the size of their Beantown presence, the top Boston firms are Ropes & Gray, Goodwin, Mintz Levin, WilmerHale, and Morgan Lewis. However, some of the top firms in Boston for lateral hiring may surprise you. Seven Boston firms have landed in the double-digits to date in 2017: Burns & Levinson, Goodwin, Kirkland & Ellis, McCarter & English, Mintz Levin, Prince Lobel, and Ropes & Gray.

It’s worth noting that Kirkland & Ellis is the latest in the most notable new Boston office openings of late, announcing its new as-of-now all corporate Boston presence in May 2017. If they follow the same pattern in Boston as they have in Houston, we can expect to see Kirkland on this double digits list next year as well.

White & Case bucked the corporate and IP trend by opening a Boston office in April 2016 with a team of white-collar litigators. The Palo Alto-based Wilson Sonsini opened a Boston office in February 2016, to focus primarily on life sciences and IP-related work. This latest wave follows Boston office openings by Sidley Austin in 2013, and Latham & Watkins and Jones Day both in 2011. We will continue to keep an eye on these relatively newer players in Boston as well.

Conclusion

Deciding if and when to make a lateral move requires reflection on your own personal and professional situation and also a careful analysis of the specific market. It is useful to understand recent hiring trends to best position yourself within that market. It is also important to work with a recruiter who is knowledgeable about the specific market. At Lateral Link, each recruiter specializes in one or just a few markets where we have practiced ourselves and/or where we are on the ground to build relationships with the firms’ key players. We can help you make sense of the lateral hiring trends and we can also help answer questions such as:

• How important is it that I have ties to the area?
• How important is it that I have the local bar before starting my search?
• When in my career and when in the calendar year is the ideal time to move?
• Would a particular lateral move get me closer to my career goal?
• Which firms will be most interested in a candidate with a profile and skill set such as mine?

These are particularly key questions for lawyers looking to enter the Boston market. And for a seasoned Boston lawyer contemplating a move within this tight-knit legal world, discretion is imperative. Having an experienced intermediary can be essential in assuring that your skills and experience are valued to their highest.

[1] Note there were only 18 lateral hires in Massachusetts outside of the state capital, not a significant number.

---

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.